Running a website powered by wordpress is an easy job, but running and hosting it in most effective & efficient way is the toughest part. Certainly, you can easily install WordPress application & few useful plugins along with a nice and eye catching theme which is sufficient to start your blog or website, but hosting and managing a WordPress site in a efficient way could be more harder.

We are going to share some tips and ways to get most out of your Wordpress site. To reduce system resources usage and lower the page load time, you will have to manage and maintain the site as efficiently as possible so that it can run optimally.

Keep your WordPress installation updated

Since WordPress is most widely used application, it is also the most targeted website platform by hackers and intruders which are always discovering new security holes and exploiting them. The majority of websites being hacked is due to either because of outdated WordPress installations or insecure plugins and themes.

You should always keep your wordpress installation updated, it will make sure that your site does not become the very next victim of hackers. WordPress now has a feature to automatically update itself for any minor releases. The auto update function should be enabled in order to receive all maintenance releases and security fixes immediately as they are available.

Remove unused themes and plugins

Being a web hosting provider we know that almost all users does not delete unused themes & plugins, they simply keep them disabled/deactivated. Disabled items still poses security risks since these items are then not updated to latest versions and their files may have several discovered vulnerabilities.

When a theme or plugin is not to be used, make sure to delete it completely. You can always install it again when required in future.

Choose plugins and themes wisely

There are many plugins and themes available which offers several features and options, users usually install such plugins & themes which provides multiple features while they only need an small one. They should avoid using such plugins & themes that offers everything, instead they should use one which only has their required feature or option. For example, if you just want to display number of Facebook likes, choose a plugin that does just that, not one that has several other features such as Facebook Comments Box or Like Box. While you will not be using extra features but the plugin's code itself will consume more system resources.

There are many poorly coded plugins & themes which uses significant higher system resources. You shouldn't just choose them by their attractive look and features, instead before using each and every plugin and theme, make sure to do some research, whether they are any good or not and they are coded well.

Use Caching - Speed up website

Use of cache plugin could drastically improve the performance of your site. It does create and save static copy of dynamic pages on disk and then serve them again to visitors without actually executing the Wordpress code. Since only static contents are served, your site will be using less server resources, page load time would also decrease by several times.

You can easily enable caching by using cache plugins such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve static content

Use of CDN is a great way to improve website performance while reducing page load time. It does keep copy of static contents such as images, videos, css & Java script etc. across all Point-of-Presence (POPS) then depending on visitors location the static content is served from the nearest POP, the close proximity of POP location allows loading of contents and pages much quicker.

Make Periodic backups

You should always make periodic backup of your website, if some thing goes wrong with the website, for example, server crash or an update which messed up the site, you will be able to restore your website in working condition quickly.

Backups are usually ignored by webmasters, while it is most critical part of managing a website. You should always be making backups before every update and make sure that you are not storing backups on same server where your website is being hosting. If something goes wrong with the server you will also lose your backup which forfeits the purpose of backup. Backups should be stored securely in your local computers hard drive as well as on a remote backup server such as DropBox, Google Drive or any third party FTP Server space. There are many Wordpress plugins available which helps automate the backup process easily.